VENTURA COUNTY STAR: Fill those Treasury jobs

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Reprinted from the March 9 Ventura County Star:

The Obama White House should embark on a crash program to staff the Treasury department.

Five weeks after he was confirmed as Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner is still without the cadre of top officials — the deputy secretary and the assistant secretaries — that makes the department run. And this lack of progress in naming the key players administering hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money has become an issue on Wall Street, whose waning confidence in the Obama administration is a key factor in the tanking markets.

The problem of the empty Treasury offices became even more dire with the disclosure late last week that Mr. Geithner's choices, both well respected, for two critical posts — deputy secretary, the department's No. 2 official, and the undersecretary of international affairs — both withdrew from consideration. They withdrew in part, according to The Wall Street Journal, because of the Obama administration's protracted vetting process.

The situation verged on farce when the Treasury went unrepresented at a Senate Banking Committee hearing because the department had no one to send.

There are several factors at work here.

The Obama administration is terrified of being embarrassed by something in the background of its nominees that went undetected. The guiding principle of President Obama's talent hunters can't be fear of making a mistake; that leads to paralysis. If something unsavory turns up in a senior official's background, there's a simple way to deal with it. The people in the top jobs serve purely at the pleasure of the president and they can be out the door the same afternoon.

Another problem is that President Obama shut himself off from a lot of talent and experience when, his first day in office, he ruled out recruiting lobbyists. He should have seen the fallacy of an ironclad rule when he almost immediately had to grant a waiver so an executive and a lobbyist for a major defense contractor could take the No. 2 job at the Pentagon.

The Jack Abramoffs are an exception. Most lobbyists do what they do because of their experience and expertise. Again, the administration should have faith in its judgment.

And, finally, there is the vetting paperwork, which gets more exhaustive with each successive presidency and has again under President Obama. Having two nominees quit because of it tells you something is seriously wrong.

A task force called the Presidential Appointee Initiative studied this problem and made extensive and sensible recommendations for fixing it. They're sitting in boxes over at the Brookings Institution. One of the Washington wise men active in that drive is your economic adviser, Paul Volcker. Ask him.

Students of government might want to take comfort — or find alarm — in this: President Obama is actually further along in staffing his administration than his two predecessors were at the same stage in theirs.